The Professional You

The Whole YOU.jpg

Defining the Professional YOU is the most difficult part of the design process.

By the time you get here you’ll have been gazing into a crystal ball and envisioning your future. It’s a lot of pressure, but you won’t be alone. Figuring out the Professional YOU will require digging for information and talking to people about the future. This can’t be rushed, so go slow and expect this part to take weeks or months to complete.

Defining the Professional YOU is so difficult, we’ve developed a series of Designing YOU Career Guides and podcasts to support you as you work down this path. The Career Guides and Podcasts explore some of the crucial questions facing anyone exploring their Professional YOU.  

  1. What are the different careers options?

  2. What does it take to be a professional in a specific area?

  3. What’s the future of different professions and what does this mean to me?

  4. How have other professionals got to where they are today?

  5. And the inevitable… how much money can I make doing different jobs?

To support this, we’ve designed a series of Career Guides that include detailed mission maps to help guide your design.

a 10-Year Mission 

For most twenty-somethings, ten years may as well be 100 years. So it's common for a lot of people get frozen by the daunting task of looking ahead ten years. One of the biggest barriers to moving forward is the question:

What do I want to do when I graduate and walk into the real-world?

There’s a problem with this question. The "real-world" doesn’t begin after graduation, it’s happening right now.

The knowledge and skills you'll need to deliver on your 10-Year Professional Mission can’t all be learned by accident. Rather, they need to be the outcome of an intentional development process rooted in five building blocks. 

1.       education & learning

2.       employment experiences

3.       volunteer experiences

4.       contextual experiences

5.       important relationships

In other words, the expertise you’ll possess in ten years, whether it as a marine biologist or an accountant, shouldn't be a fluke. It needs to be planned. 

Mission Map Gallery

Before you develop your own Mission Map, we've included dozens of different Mission Maps based 10 years into a career. Each map is a summary based on interviews and surveys of real people and their real experiences in their careers and in life.  If you'd like to start by exploring our range of Career Mission Maps, click here to search our Designing YOU Mission Map Gallery.  

There is never just one single map to get from here to there. Consider these sample Mission Maps more of a compass than a GPS. They won’t tell you exactly how to get from here to there, but they’ll point you in the right direction, tell you where to start and offer support on the way.